The present disclosure relates generally to computer systems and, more particularly, to techniques for handling high volumes of processing requests.
Many computer systems have been developed to handle high volumes of processing requests from users. In transaction-oriented environments, there is a need to process very high volumes of transactions quickly. Traditionally, such processing requests were handle by a single mainframe computer system. Users of such mainframe computer systems would submit processing requests (e.g., making an airline reservation) from either local or remote terminals. The ability to handle such processing requests or transactions in a timely manner was limited by the resources of the computer system. As a result, mainframe computer systems were designed and developed with ever-increasing amounts of computing resources. For example, the speed of CPUs and the speed and amount of memory has increased dramatically over time. Nevertheless, the actual computing resources of such mainframe computer systems seemed to always lag behind the users needs for computing resources.
Because single mainframe computers were unable to satisfy the users"" requirements and because of their high cost, multi-computer systems were developed to help satisfy the requirements. The computing resources of such multi-computer systems can be increased by adding additional computers to the system. Thus, the architectures of the multi-computer systems were in some sense scalable to provide ever-increasing computer resources. A problem with such multi-computer systems has been the high overhead associated with the systems. The high overhead stems from the processing required for the computers to coordinate their activities.
The popularity of the Internet has significantly increased the need for computing resources. A web server may be accessed by thousands and tens of thousands of users each day. These users may require that significant computing resources be expended to satisfy their requests. Current techniques of multi-computer systems are inadequate to handle such a high demand for computing resources. It would be desirable to have a multi-computer system that can handle the increased demand. Also, it would be desirable to reduce the overhead associated with such multi-computer systems.